Drive Upgrades for Macbook Pro Retina and Macbook Air – a Tricky Proposition

The Macbook Pro Retina is a an amazing computer – an unreal screen, a very nice form factor, and extremely fast. But these good qualities come with a major Achilles heel – in order to hit this form factor, Apple had to remove anything that was more than just a few millimeters in height. That means no DVD, and no standard-sized drives. And, of course, the same is true with the Macbook Air. So what is the MBPR or MBA owner to do to increase storage capacity? Well, there are three choices, and one possibly-useful alternate.

The fastest is just to increase the size of the internal drive (which is a non-standard SSD, not the typical 2.5″ enclosure, as there’s not enough room in these computers). The internal replacements are not cheap. The 500GB replacement is over $500. You can find them via the links below, or on ebay, though that’s potentially dicey. The Apple OEM 768GB SSD is about $900, and not sold separately by Apple. Make sure you get the correct version for your computer, as the MBPR and MBA drives are slightly different shapes. Here are the variousMacbook Air SSDs. Here are the Macbook Retina SSDs.

Update on 4-28-2014: Great News! The flash-memory company Transcend has come to the rescue with a new line of upgrade drives for these machines – You can read all about them here.

The cheapest solution with some good space is the Thunderbolt & USB3 drive from Buffalo. It’s avail in 500GB for $157, 1TB for $190, and is very fast, for a HD. You’ll see about 105MB/s read and write via Thunderbolt, and it comes with a TB cable. It is available in Japan with an SSD, but not stateside yet. We recently disassembled one and put an SSD in it, and got 367MB/s out of it. That is super impressive, and we’ll have a full review here soon. It’s a truly exceptional drive, but it is an external, so a bit inconvenient.

The third choice, which we’ve also used extensively, is to use an SD card in the built-in SD slot as a drive (Note: this does not work with the Macbook Air 11′, as there is no SD slot in that machine). You can get a 45MB/s card 128GB SD card (about half the speed of a fast internal HD) for $160. If you want it faster, you can get full Hard drive speeds (95MB/s) for $150 with this card. Unfortunately, there is no 128GB or larger very fast SD yet. Stay away from the Lexar large SD‘s; they’re much slower than they should be. Yes, we own and use everything we’ve linked to, other than the 128GB Sandisk; we have the 64GB version of that one.

Sadly, those are your choices. The only other interesting possiblity, if you don’t want to be tethered to an external drive, is to buy a “mobile NAS” drive like these. With one of those, you could simply run it in your laptop bag (make sure it doesn’t overheat), and be un-teathered but have storage. Of course the problem is it will be much slower than any of the other stuff I mentioned above.